Feminitat i individualisme a Infidels: identitats de gènere i representacions de les relacions sexuals i afectives al paradigma postromàntic

Abstract

This Catalan TV series is based on the internationally successful formats of new women’s products such as Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives. Infidels builds a discourse that fractures romantic love ideals, primarily through generalized infidelity and the fight for independence of the female leading roles. While the romantic ideal did seem to be under reconstruction in the programme’s last season as one of the characters’ main motives, this was only through acceptance of this ideal’s opposite. The series takes a didactic approach in favour of the individualization of women’s life choices and of the inclusion of a multiplicity of alternative family relations and structures to
eteronormativity, although it maintains penalizing limits on practices such as cybersex. It also uses distinct justifying strategies to explain male and female infidelity, safeguarding in this way the division between genders and the attribution of certain behaviours as appropriate for either men or women. Likewise, Infidels establishes exclusions, based mainly on social class factors.

KEYWORDS: TV series, gender roles, gender representations, sexual and affective relationships, post-feminism, individualisation.